Month: December 2017

I’m still busy learning how to troubleshoot .NET Core apps on Linux. Now I more or less understand where to start if I need to analyze .NET Core memory usage, but that’s not the most frequent problem we usually have. Most of the time the main problem is high CPU usage, which obviously leads to the question “What this thing’s doing now??”.

On Windows I’d usually start with analyzing application logs, trace files or performance reports. If that wasn’t enough I’d download Perfview tool and profiled running executable itself. How many threads are there? What functions they execute the most? What their call stacks are? And so forth. The only downside of that tool is that I never read its documentation, so whole troubleshooting experience sometimes resembled a meditation on the monitor, worshiping the holy Google and wild guessing.

While logs and traces are obviously there on Linux as well, I was wondering, can I profile the app in the similar way I would do on Windows? The answer is “Oh, yes”. Monitor, worshiping, guessing – it’s all there.

Most of the last week I’ve been experimenting with our .NET Windows project running on Linux in Kubernetes. It’s not as crazy as it sounds. We already migrated from .NET Framework to .NET Core, I fixed whatever was incompatible with Linux, tweaked here and there so it can run in k8s and it really does now. In theory.

In practice, there’re still occasional StackOverflow exceptions (zero segfaults, however) and most of troubleshooting experience I had on Windows is useless here on Linux. For instance, very quickly we noticed that memory consumption of our executable is higher than we’d expect. Physical memory varied between 300 MiB and 2 GiB and virtual memory was tens and tens of gigabytes. I know in production we could use much higher than that, but here, in container on Linux, is that OK? How do I even analyze that?

On Windows I’d took a process dump, feed it to Visual Studio or WinDBG and tried to google what’s to do next. Apparently, googling works for Linux as well, so after a few hours I managed learn several things about debugging on Linux and I’d like to share some of them today. Continue reading “Analyzing .NET Core memory on Linux with LLDB”